E.P. Thompson's classic article "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century" emphasised women's role in many food riots. He argued that the rioters insisted on the idea of a moral community that was obliged to feed them and their families. As one contemporary commentator wrote: 'Women are more disposed to be mutinous ... [and] in all public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity.' [1]

John Bohstedt later argued that Thompson had exaggerated women's role in food riots. Thompson responded by forcefully rejecting Bohstedt's criticism.[2] We will never know the exact proportion of women's involvement in 18th Century food riots, but it appears that, at the very least, women led or initiated a significant minority of such riots and they participated in many more. This involvement by women is in striking contrast to women's lack of participation in earlier uprisings such as the widespread popular revolts of the late Middle Ages.[3] This indicates that women's new assertiveness had something to do with the weakening of the patriarchal control of women as feudalism declined and market relations expanded.

Women also participated with men in food riots in Ireland, Belgium, Holland and Germany (where contemporary reports claimed that women initiated many riots). Women also conducted nearly a third of food riots during the American Revolution.[4]

Women were especially prominent in food riots in French marketplaces (although men dominated those in the countryside).[5] The most momentous French food riot was The Women's March on Versailles. This occurred in October 1789, when the market women of Paris began calling the men 'cowards' and declaring: 'We will take over!' These women proceeded to march to Versailles with soldiers following them. This crowd then forced the King to return to Paris where, three years later, women were again major participants in the demonstrations that led to the abolition of the monarchy. As a police inspector said in 1793: 'It is mainly the women who are stirred up, women who in turn communicate all their frenzy to the men, heating them up with their seditious propositions and stimulating the most violent effervescence.'[6]

Meanwhile, women in the countryside initiated 'counter-revolutionary' protests against the new government's policies of the repression of the Church and the conscription of male peasants into the army.[7]

Later, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, women were prominent in preventing the army from moving their cannons from Paris, an event which helped spark the Paris Commune.[8]

Women's protests for the right to vote became particularly militant in Britain. They included arson, widespread window breaking and attempts to storm both Parliament and Buckingham Palace. The shift to wartime patriotism in 1914, however, derailed the suffragette movement.[9]

Suffragette handbill

During World War I, women led large numbers of food riots in Germany, Russia, Italy and elsewhere.[10] Women workers also led the way in strike-waves in Berlin and Paris. The German authorities reported that union leaders were doing 'everything possible to prevent such disturbances and strikes over food provisions, but ... it is the countless female workers who constantly agitate and stir things up.' Women's prominence in these struggles helped delegitimize the war, and the regimes that were fighting it, paving the way for the huge strike-waves and revolutions at the end of the war.[11]

Aftermath of Berlin food riot, 1918

Women also led food riots in non-belligerent Japan and Spain. Women's protests against high food prices spread across Spain in both 1913 and 1918. In Barcelona, in 1918, women used the slogan: 'In the name of humanity, all women take to the streets!'. They organised repeated demonstrations and attacked shops, warehouses, government offices and music halls. Women also staged food riots during the Spanish Civil War.[12] Temma Kaplan has theorised such uprisings as examples of 'female consciousness'.[13]

Marxists, such as Vladimir Lenin, warned against food riots. But Karl Marx himself had recognised that 'great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment'[14] and, in 1917, it was Petrograd's female workers who spread the idea of a general strike on 8 March, International Women's Day. On that day, hundreds of women threw stones and snowballs at factory windows and then dragged their fellow male workers on to the streets, where the rioting crowds had no problems creating their own leaders. Women participated in the riots by, for instance, attacking police stations. However, many troops refused to shoot protesting women, who were often with their children. As Leon Trotsky later wrote, the women took hold of the soldiers' rifles and 'beseeched almost commanded: "put down your bayonets and join us"', and, within five days, the centuries-old Tsarist regime had collapsed.[15]

Scarcity and hunger made it very difficult for Russian workers to transform society themselves and women's participation did not continue at the same level as in February/March 1917. However, it was women's food protests, in May 1918, that sparked the first major wave of workers' unrest against the new Bolshevik authorities.[16] Then, later, during Joseph Stalin's program of breakneck industrialisation and forced collectivisation, women were again at the forefront of the workers' strikes and peasant protests that resisted this brutal policy.[17] Stalin's regime was, however, able to contain all resistance through starvation and repression.

Studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers show that their strong sense of moral community is maintained by autonomous individuals who constantly resist any form of personal domination. In fact, many hunter-gatherers are so egalitarian and communistic that even a non-Marxist anthropologist like Christopher Boehm argues that hunter-gatherer societies - the first human societies - must have originated in uprisings against dominant males.[22]